The Long Home
The Long Home
a novel by William
Gay
© 1999 William Gay
e-book ISBN: 978-1-84982-100-1
In a literary voice that is both original and powerfully unsettling,
William Gay tells the story of Nathan Winer, a young and headstrong Tennessee
carpenter who lost his father years ago to an evil that is greater and closer
at hand than any the boy can imagine— until he learns of it first-hand. Gay’s
remarkable debut novel, The Long Home, is also the
story of Amber Rose, a beautiful young woman forced to live beneath that evil,
who recognizes that Nathan is her first and last chance at escape. And it
is the story of William Tell Oliver, a solitary old man who watches the growing
evil from the dark woods and adds to his own weathered guilt by failing to
do anything about it.
Set in rural Tennessee in the 1940s, The Long Home
will bring to mind once again the greatest Southern novelists and will haunt
the reader with its sense of solitude, longing, and the deliverance that is
always just out of reach.
He lay on a tabled shelf of limestone and watched the
slow, majestic roll of the fall constellations. He realized with something
akin to regret that he had no names to affix to them though he’d known them
all his life. The stars looked bright and close and earlier an orange harvest
moon had cradled up out of the pines so huge he felt he could reach up and
touch them. By its light the Mormon Springs branch was frozen motionless and
it gleamed like silver, the woods deep and still. It seemed strange to lie
here and listen to the sounds of the jukebox filtered up out of the darkness,
windbrought and maudlin plaints, but no less real for being maudlin. Once
or twice cries of anger or exultation arose and he thought he might go see
what prompted them but he did not. He just lay with his coat rolled beneath
his head for a pillow and listened to all the sounds of the night, ears attuned
for her footfalls.
E-published in 2012 by MP Publishing Limited
12 Strathallan Crescent, Douglas, Isle of Man, IM2 4NR, British Isles
The Long Home © 1999 William Gay b. 1943
Book Design by Laurie Dolphin
Cover Photograph by Dos Passos/Bruce Coleman Inc.
Realization Gloria Knecht
e-book created by GSH 2011
A novel in two books: 16 “chapters”
First published in 1999 by MacMurray & Beck,
Denver, Colorado.
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This e-book is sold subject to the condition that
it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or
otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar
condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any
other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by
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rights is appreciated.
This novel won the 1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize
–
This first novel is for my first daughter,
LEE GAY WARREN, in love and gratitude, and with the knowledge that her belief
never faltered.
WILLIAM GAY was the author of four novels,
including Provinces of Night, Twilight, as well as I Hate
to See That Evening Sun Go Down, a collection of short stories. He lived
in Hohenwald, Tennessee. Sadly, William died in February 2012 in his sixty-ninth
year.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to acknowledge a debt to his editor,
Greg Michalson, and thank him for his skill and patience. He would also like to
thank Renee Leonard for her help in the preparation of this manuscript.
Like flies, the minute-winning days buzz home to death, and
every moment is a window on all time.
— Thomas Wolfe, Look Homewards, Angel (1929)
Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears
shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper
shall be a burden, and desire shall fail; because man goeth to his long home,
and the mourners go about the streets.
— Ecclesiastes 12: 5
Prologue: 1933
Book One – 1943
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Book Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
the long home
a novel by
william gay
Thomas Hovington was walking across his backyard when he heard a sound that caused him to drop the bag of feed he was carrying and stand transfixed. It was a curious kind of sound that seemed to come from the bowels of the earth, from somewhere beneath his feet, a dull, muffled boom that he could feel in his teeth and hear rattle the glass in the unglazed windows behind him. While he stood motionless it came again, somewhere beneath the branch-run, like great round stones rolling down chambered corridors in the earth or some great internal storm flaring in the hollows of the world, lightning quaking unseen in sepulchers dark and sleek and damp, the surfaces of the earth trembling at the thunder’s repercussions.
He went back to the edge of the porch and sat uncertainly and stared at the solid earth he’d taken so for granted. Hovington was in his twenties then and his back not yet bent. He had just recently commenced bootlegging and some vague childhood remnant of religion troubled him, made him look about for signs of retribution. It might be a sign. A warning.
If so, it wanted no misunderstanding. When it came this time it sounded as if a truckload of dynamite had exploded and almost immediately the branch began to rise and the air filled with water and flying stones. “They Goddamn,” Hovington cried. He threw his arms about his head and leapt up wildly while the rocks were falling on the roof in a rising tintinnabulation and below the spring a veritable floor of limestone rose in a solid sheet and subsided in slabs half the size of automobiles.
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